Collection Builder

[Venoras]

Hello pepak,
thanks for this nice tool. It makes creating of and working with
collections much more useful.

Originally I had some problems with your current release (0.08),
since after using it, all bookmarks and collections were gone.
Then I realized that german "umlauts" (äöü) in the file names
were the problem, since colbuild did add some new entries for
them, obvioulsly not being able to find the existing ones in
the XML file. So I renamed the offending files and all was fine.

Later I started to modify the code a bit to avoid the file
renaming, with partial success (I'm not very experienced in
Pascal programming and just fought my way through Free
Pascal until I got it working somehow ). Basically I just had
to convert the filename with the OemToUTF8 function
(which additionally needed some fixes, since it seemed to
overwrite some memory elsewhere, at least with my
FreePascal version).

Now I'm wondering how I could contribute my changes,
Can I just send them to you ? I'm not sure how relevant
they are for other people, since you seem to have
enough success with national characters otherwise.
Maybe the problem just arises with the newer german
firmware 1.4?

Best regards,
V

[pepak]

Originally Posted by Venoras

Now I'm wondering how I could contribute my changes. Can I just send them to you ? I'm not sure how relevant they are for other people, since you seem to have enough success with national characters otherwise.
Maybe the problem just arises with the newer german
firmware 1.4?

If you send the changes to me (via PM), I will check them out and add them to the application.

The problem arises from the fact that I only ever use 7-bit ASCII for filenames, so I never felt any press to add international support. It was just laziness on my part, nothing else :-)

Glad you find the utility useful.

[Mike_73]

I don't want to interrupt here, but is there a place I can find documentation on how the collection thing works? For example where is the place the collections are stored, what entries does the file need, etc. I would need it in english.
I was wondering if I could just use an Access database. Something like a file browser where I can just add categories like book, magazine, etc. as some kind of tag and then write the necessary file for the reader.
I'm no programmer, but I have some experience using Access. And I really want a stand alone app that only handles collections as I usually just drag and drop my files in a explorer.

Thanks for any help

[kartu]

Mike, information about collections is stored in:
/database/cache/media.xml file in case of internal memory, corresponding SD/MS card file is /Sony Reader/database/cache.xml, but I don't know, whether it's also used for collections. You'll have to learn how to manipulate XML files, if you want to write an app that handles your collections.

The following code creates "News" collection, that is referencing 5 books, with ids: 125,126,128,130,132:

		<xs1:playlist title="News" sourceid="0" id="122" uuid="170F63AF81A8-4D3D-B615-616A63F9BE06">
			<xs1:item id="125"/>
			<xs1:item id="126"/>
			<xs1:item id="128"/>
			<xs1:item id="130"/>
			<xs1:item id="132"/>
		</xs1:playlist>

Books are desribed as <xs1:text...> items.

[Mike_73]

Thanks for the info Kartu. I'll try to look into it.

[pepak]

Apparently I am not needed here :-)

[kartu]

pepak
Ah, sorry, couldn't resist.

[Mike_73]

Ok, I didn't get to it yet and actually, I wouldn't want to install the library software. Could anyone send me the necessary xml file with and without some collections so I could try to see what access does to it? I assume there's also a difference between books on the reader and books on memory card!?